drplokta | A Decade Online

Give or take a couple of weeks. As far as I can tell from Google (and wouldn't a complete permanent freely searchable Usenet archive have surprised everyone ten years ago), this was my first Usenet post, to rec.arts.sf.written, on the 8th of July 1993.

At the time, I was using a 14.4kbps modem and a PC with a 25MHz 486SX, 4MB of RAM and a 100MB hard disk. Now I'm on 512kbps ADSL and a Mac Powerbook with a 1GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM and a 60GB hard disk. Moore's law is supposed to predict doubling every two years, which would imply that I'd now have 460 kbps of bandwidth, an 800MHz CPU, 128MB of RAM and a 3GB hard disk. The PC was a couple of years old in 1993, while the Powerbook is only eight months old, but I think it's safe to say that the tech industry has been doing rather better than Moore's Law.

I opened a Demon account, when Demon was the UK's biggest ISP with about 1,500 members, because they had a POP in Warrington (carefully chosen to be a local call from both Liverpool and Manchester) which was charge band A (an intermediate rate between local and long distance that doesn't exist any more) from Chester.

I was using the MS-DOS-based KA9Q Internet stack with SMTP email, Usenet and ftp access. It wasn't until later in 1993 that I started to experiment with Winsock stacks and a couple of beta versions of Windows programs called Mosaic and Cello that allowed one to browse something called the world-wide web, using some obscure protocol called http --

bohemiancost couldn't see the point.

O'Reilly was just starting up the Global Network Navigator site, which was intended to be a manual catalogue of every web page. Back in 1993, it pretty well was a catalogue of every web page, but the explosive growth of the web very quickly outstripped their ability to keep up, and in fact I was astonished to discover that it still exists, after a fashion, when I Googled for it a few minutes ago. The verb in that last sub-clause should give some kind of subtle hint as to what has replaced it. And in fact, they were doomed from the start, since "I GNNed for it" was never going to enter the language. But given more resources back at the beginning, they could have been Yahoo.

At the 2003 Worldcon, ConFrancisco, I went to what was pretty well the last @! Worldcon party, open to anyone who had an email address. This year, I suspect you could poll a hundred people at random at Torcon and fail to find one who didn't have an email address of some kind.

On 12 April 1994, Cantor & Siegel posted an advertisement for immigration services to pretty well every Usenet group, and the term "spam" entered the language in a context other than dangerous pink lunch-meat. And don't we all wish that spam hadn't caught on as much as the web did. In 1993 I was getting no spam email. I'm now over 500 per day, not counting my work email account (which gets much less, to be fair).

Since 1993, many things have changed. I've divorced, moved from Chester to London and changed job four times. But I can still be emailed as mike@moose.demon.co.uk -- although I recommend that you don't, since it's 99.9% spam these days, and heavily filtered by the wonderful Spambayes.

So what effect has the Internet had on my life? Well, without the Internet I certainly wouldn't be seeing who I'm seeing, living where I'm living, or doing the job I'm doing. E-mail is a pretty essential glue to hold long-distance relationships together. I moved to London to work in a dot-com startup. And I'm still working for a dot-com, although I've been through two previous less successful ones. In fact, I run the servers for the number 16 UK web-site (that's based on number of pages served to UK users from a UK-based site), and that obscure protocol called http is my bread and butter, around fifteen million times per day.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The combination of large amounts of information and ways of accessing it is the really amazing thing to me. When I'm faced with almost any technical problem, or just vague interest, my first instinct is to hit a search engine.

I started using Usenet groups around 89 (I think - google give 90, but I don't believe it). The next watershed for me was the establishment of cmp-lg, which was a mailing list and ftp repository for research papers in computational linguistics and really changed accessibility to technical publications. In late 93 or early 94, I was visiting the University of Edinburgh, and they showed me something called the world wide web, and something called Mosaic; it wasn't immediately clear to me whether they were things they had developed (they weren't) or whether this was just another misguided attempt to make hypertext relevant (it wasn't). Around then, my employer got an internet connection, on a machine which was carefully kept separate from the rest of our network. We used to transfer data by means of the information super-footpath, i.e. putting stuff on a tape and carrying across the office. One day, I put a query into lycos for the first time, and found exactly what I was looking for. That was about the last time a search engine was any good until around 3 years ago when google grew large and precise enough to be useful.

The next stage to me is better mobile data access. I have a PDA with a wireless connection and that's fine until I'm away from somewhere I can connect. I do keep lots of random information on it in case it might be useful one day (as happened when a friend's daughter happened to ask a question about the periodic table which I'd copied to my PDA for no very clear reason). Phone/PDA combinations are still too expensive and slow for my taste. I think we'll see wireless nearly everywhere soon, and that'll move things forward.

The bit I find most odd about all this is that you signed off your first Usenet post as "Michael". The rest I could largely have guessed if I'd sat down to think about it.

I'm pretty sure that I was having problems with the configuration of the software. It appears that I fixed it after my first two posts.

"(and wouldn't a complete permanent freely searchable Usenet archive have surprised everyone ten years ago)"

I'm not as convinced about its completeness.

Google says my first post was in July 1995 -- or, rather, the first post under my name was, which was Ulrika using my computer to post to rec.arts.sf.fandom

The fact that there was a computer and software already set up to read and post is strongly indicative that perhaps this wasn't really "my" first post. {cough}

Actually, I've been online since the fall of 1982, when I would access BITNET from the computer network at my college (http://www.pomona.edu/). But much of my activity back then was chat on the program known as RELAY, which almost certainly was never archived.

At the 2003 Worldcon, ConFrancisco, I went to what was pretty well the last @! Worldcon party, open to anyone who had an email address.

When mentioning LJ to other fans, I use those parties as the closest analogue from recent (i.e., mutual) history.

A Decade Online

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